Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11,892 posts.
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
[LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision. Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach…
Would a libertarian society recognize patents as legitimate? What about copyright? In Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney of many
Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ is a widely cited report that analyzes the cost competitiveness of renewables, energy storage, and system considerations.
Yesterday’s post about code syntax color schemes got me thinking about what is perhaps the ultimate color scheme, Windows 3.1’s “Hot Dog Stand”: The truly funny thing about this color scheme is that all the other Windows 3.1 color schemes are surprisingly rational, totally reasonable color
Cloudflare is a security company, and the heart of Workers is, in my view, a security project. Running code written by third parties is always a scary proposition, and the primary concern of the Workers team is to make that safe.
A year ago, we announced the start of efforts to implement support for a component in Firefox that would allow content wrapped in Digital Rights Management
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
This article will help you overcome one of the greatest difficulties you will face when trying to accelerate learning: formulating knowledge.
One of the greatest feature of the Rebol language has always been its parsing engine, simply called Parse. It is an amazing piece of des...
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
Most of the money in the economy is created by banks when they provide loans.
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.”…
The Backend Infrastructure team at Discord was hard at work improving the scalability and performance of our core real-time communications infrastructure.
Not happy that I cite Sean Lennon as a source of evidence concerning the way they can be used in modern English? Feeling that only something 400 years older would really convince you that it's OK. Has Coby Lubliner got news for you! Coby writes from Berkeley to point out the following lines from Shakespeare's A Comedy…
WebRTC enables peer-to-peer communication. It requires servers so that clients can exchange metadata and coordinate communication through a process called signaling . Servers also help clients cope with network address translators (NATs) and firewalls.
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
An introduction to Go errors.
